In our work supporting users and makers of Quantified Self tools we pay close attention to how others talk about trends and markets. In the past year, the most-used catch all term for devices that help us track ourselves has been “wearables.” Now, it’s clear that wearables covers only a fraction of QS practices. Many of…
A month ago we showed you what we thought was the quintessential example of how Quantified Self is becoming more of a mainstream activity. During a trip to the Apple store we identified over 20 different Quantified Self devices. Another outing led me into one of the largest consumer electronics stores in the US: Best Buy. Here,…
Jakob Eg Larsen and Yoni Donner, who have both created tools for quantifying mental performance, describe their session for QS Conference 2012: “Cognitive Measurements.”
Mike Winter does a lot of crazy research projects, including building an autonomous motorcycle. But when his daughter was in a bicycle accident a couple of years ago, he started thinking about bike safety. Specifically, he built a device with an Arduino CPU and a few sensors that attaches to your bike and connects with your…
At a recent QS-themed event at Stanford, 3-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond described the constant stream of new technologies that make bicycles lighter and more streamlined and that provide ever more detailed monitoring of the cyclists. In contrast, innovation in swimming seems limited to controversial bathing suits. Competitive swimmer Hind Hobeika aims to…
Jakob Larsen and his team at the Mobile Informatics Lab at the Technical University of Denmark have developed a way to build a real-time 3-D model of your brain using a smartphone and the Emotiv EPOC game controller headset. In the Ignite talk below, Jakob describes how the fourteen sensors in this mobile EEG device rival…
Hind Hobeika is a swimmer and an engineer from Beirut. She wanted to monitor her heart rate while she was swimming, so she built goggles that sense and display her heart rate in real time. It’s called the Butterfleye Project. In this great talk below, she describes how she designed and assembled the goggles, the…
Ted Punt talks about a device developed by TNO (Dutch Institute for Applied Science) to measure vital signs from people at a distance of up to 10 meters. Heart rate, body motion, and respiration are measured continuously and wirelessly with this device, which should be on the market within a year. He goes into some…
A few months ago I was fatigued and decided to try a more rigorous sleep hygiene routine to see if it would help (it did). To make the experiment fun I thought I’d look for a nifty iPhone app to track the data. After a fairly extensive search I noticed that most of the tools…
Our first Quantified Self Show and Tell in Amsterdam took place on September 20 at Het Volkskrantgebouw. More than sixty people showed up to attend and some even came from Germany and France! Sebastiaan ter Burg kindly provided us help with the video and photos. All the videos can be found on Vimeo and all photos on Flickr….
A new noise/ozone sensor watch being tested in Europe. Quantified Self enthusiast David Purdy asked me one day, “Why aren’t people measuring simple ambient things like background noise?” I didn’t have a good answer at the time, but I do now. It turns out a project in France is doing just what David suggested.
This was the scene two days ago, when the lower floor of the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose was opened after hours to an energetic group of Quantified Self enthusiasts and interested spectators. The first 90 minutes was filled with mingling, enjoying healthy munchies, and gathering around the various devices that people brought…
What do you get when you mashup open health data, government officials, and app developers? A “river of mojo” for health innovation. These are the words of Todd Park, CTO of HHS, who recently instigated the release of several government health datasets for public analysis. Park revved up the audience at the sold-out Community Health…
Here the fabulous Dr. Laird displays some of his gadgets for measuring human behavior, sure to inspire Quantified Self tinkerers and historians. Thanks to Megan and Rick Prelinger of the Prelinger Library for helping do some archeology on this topic. More fun references to come… (The movie, which was sponsored by General Motors, turns into…
This is a pre-announcement of what looks to be a service to connect the iPhone to any fitness and health self-tracking device that uses the ANT+ low power wireless protocol. In lay terms: this means that you should be able to get a bunch of things to talk to your iPhone that couldn’t before, including…
I found the following announcement from Tech-On via a tweet by Scot Kozicki, and found it very entertaining. A company called WIN Human Recorder Co Ltd has launched a new device to collect multiple streams of biometric data. There are all kinds of reasons to be skeptical of this version of the universal biometric collection…
Scott Harden, of The Blogging Rotagonist, has created a cheap, functional DIY ECG machine that you can build at home for $1 worth of parts. He has circuit diagrams, various plots of his data, and the Python code he used for his project in this detailed blog post, along with videos like the one below….
Two years ago Panasonic released a “mood phone” that supposedly tracked your emotional state by analyzing your voice. A year later Motorola awarded a $10,000 competition prize to a Duke University student whose idea was to create a phone that told you the mood of the person on the other end of the line, so…
Lately I’ve been obsessed with a hard problem that seems easy. You do things that generate data. You have a machine that measures something and produces a number. Sometimes the machine even stores the numbers, so you can look at old measurements. Maybe, if the company is very advanced, the machine will bounce the numbers…
A team lead by Thomas Kamarck of the University of Pittsburgh, an expert on measuring [psychosocial processes](http://pmbcii.psy.cmu.edu/core_c/index.html), is working on the type of wearable computer that I most want: a wrist-worn device to track physiological change in real time. The emphasis in this study is on psychosocial stress, and the device will measure sound, motion,…
